The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) by Robert Lewis Taylor Page A

and with my blanket over my shoulder and some shoes on at last—a pair of buckskin moccasins that didn’t seem to be working but were too big and needed rags stuffed in them for comfort—I lit up the hill and on into the woods. I wanted to take his shotgun, but I didn’t think it would be polite, and if there was one thing my mother was a stickler on, it was to be courteous and mind your manners while you were in somebody’s house visiting.
    So I took his hatchet instead, which was stuck upright in a stump. While we were sawing, the day before, I’d pumped him about the way to get to St. Louis, and he took me back a piece and pointed out a wagon trail to St. Genevieve, which he said was about halfway, “give or take a hundred miles,” but I imagined this was a joke. The trail was grown up with tree shoots, and the ruts filled in with weeds, but he said it was traveled a-right smart in the summers. It would have been used more, he said, except that when they busted up the river pirates around Cave-in-Rock and Natchez, some of them drifted up here and were always accommodating and would cut your throat without charge.
    This was travel news on about the same level as Ware’s
Guide
, but I hadn’t any choice, so I struck out, wishing I knew what time it was. Unless I misjudged my late host, he would rip around in the morning, and cuss, and of course blame everything on his wife, and maybe give her a couple of licks; then he would follow up the St. Genevieve trail for about five miles, mostly to avoid working. After that he would lose interest. So if I could do ten miles before dawn, I was safe. Or anyway, that’s what I figured.
    The trail was in the deep woods mainly, and sometimes hard to see, but once in a while it came out into a mossy glade of scrub evergreen, and then it was bright and pretty in the moonlight. Even in the big woods the paleness sifted down, because not all thetrees had leafed out yet, and the ground was speckled with light. Very little sound except an occasional hoot owl, and the rustle of small animals—night-prowling possums and coons, along with foxes hunting them and a soft wind that swayed the trees and breathed through the high-up larch boughs, lonely and sad, like spirits flying by.
    I made good time, and wasn’t scared, only at bushes crackling too near at hand. I thought I must have walked for two hours, and was so sleepy I’d begun to stumble. It was cold, too. This wouldn’t do, so I knew I’d got to take a nap. At the next open place, I went off a hundred yards or so, keeping the moonlit clearing in view, then made a small fire in the shelter of an oak, well out of sight. Rolled up tight in the blanket, I lay down and melted into the leaves.

Chapter V
    “Turn him over! Shake him up!”
    “It’s only a boy.”
    “Never mind that—prod him out of there.”
    I sat up, then sprang to my feet, stupid with sleep, but with an icy grabbing of my heart, too.
    They were an old man, hatless, with tumbled gray hair, two younger ones—a tall, sallow fellow dressed in gambler’s black, neat even here in the woods, and a beefy, yellow-haired brute with as ugly a face as you’d be apt to meet ouside a jail—with a pale, black-haired girl of eighteen or nineteen. They were mounted on poor-looking horses, the girl riding double behind the beefy man.
    “Well, you had to investigate, now you know the long and short of it,” said this last. “Put a ball in him and let’s be along, else he’ll describe us for sure.”
    “Hold your tongue,” replied the old man in what I thought was a very careless tone, considering the difference in their ages and size. “If I was you, Shep, I wouldn’t try to think. You haven’t had the experience.”
    The old gentleman got down—he was taller than I thought, and straight as a slat. He said, “Now let’s have a chat, sonny. What are we doing out here in the woods, eh? Don’t be afeard. Speak right out.”
    My teeth were chattering at the talk